About the time Edward Snowden was making his bid to leave frigid Moscow for the sunny beaches of Ipanema, a presidential panel delivered its recommendations on the National Security Agency’s spying practices to the White House.
The panel was charged with reviewing these practices in an effort to balance the imperatives of national security and personal liberty. So among its 46 recommendations, the panel argues for an end to the government’s collection of phone records, preferring they be left in phone-company hands; curbs to “data-mining”; tougher rules for foreign spying; no more messing with commercial software to sabotage enemies or gain info; and more.
The common thread here is that these recommendations would make information more difficult both to collect and access. Keeping records about phone calls with the phone companies, for example, not only imposes a financial burden on private business, it means the people who actually need the intel would have to go to many separate sources to get it. As we said earlier this week in reference to a federal judge’s ruling that metadata collection is unconstitutional, this is an example of pre-9/11 thinking about intelligence.
What an irony. President Obama touts himself as the man who ends wars. But without robust intel, America might find itself unable to stop the terror attacks that lead to wars. And the risks would grow.
The real scandal of the NSA is how a low-level worker such as Edward Snowden could steal so many sensitive secrets from under the department’s nose, make much of this data public and then scoot off to new life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That would be a report well worth reading.